If you experience a major heart attack the damage could cost you around five billion heart cells. Future stem cell treatments will require this number and more to ensure those cells are replaced and improve your chances of ...

Applying a dramatically improved method for "editing" genes to human stem cells, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of neuroscience Su-Chun Zhang has shown a new way to silence genes in stem cells and their progeny ...

Scientists at the Salk Institute have discovered a novel type of pluripotent stem cell—cells capable of developing into any type of tissue—whose identity is tied to their location in a developing embryo. This contrasts ...

Since 2006, research has succeeded in generating, from specialised adult cells, induced pluripotent cells (iPS cells), with huge potential applications, particularly for regenerative medicine. However, the process has still ...

Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) possess the ability to grow into almost any kind of cell, which has made them dynamic tools for studying early human development and disease, but much depends upon what they grow up in.

A pig's skin cells may hold the key to new treatments and cures for devastating human neurological diseases. Researchers from the University of Georgia's Regenerative Bioscience Center have discovered a process of turning ...

Cell therapies require a purification step that isolates the desired cell types from contaminating cells. Normally cell surface receptors are used as markers to distinguish cell types, but undesired cell types also show these ...

Understanding the molecular signals that guide early cells in the embryo to develop into different types of organs provides insight into how tissues regenerate and repair themselves. By knowing the principles that underlie ...

Steve Oh had been growing stem cells by conventional means at the A*STAR Bioprocessing Technology Institute (BTI) for seven years, when in 2008 his colleague Shaul Reuveny proposed an idea for speeding up the process.

Pluripotency

Pluripotency in the broad sense refers to "having more than one potential outcome." In biological systems, this can refer either to cells or to biological compounds. From the Latin pluri=many, potent=power, capacity. A pluripotent cell can create all cell types except for extra embryonic tissue, unlike a totipotent cell, (tot=all), which can produce every cell type including extra embryonic tissue.